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Microsoft reported higher than expected earnings Thursday, with Windows 7 license sales up despite the company's plan to release a new version of its desktop operating system later this year. The company's PC division gained 4 percent from a year ago, earning US$4.6 billion in revenue. The gain was in part thanks to an uptick in businesses buying ...

The European Commission's competition authority has given an investment group led by Sony the go-ahead to acquire EMI Group's music-publishing division for US$2.2 billion. The commission's approval is conditioned on Sony, which is partnering with ATV in this transaction, selling certain music assets and changing some business practices. The other ...

Facebook will make its public trading debut on Nasdaq on May 17, according to a TechCrunch report citing multiple anonymous sources The much-anticipated IPO reportedly will value the company at US$100 billion....

Every day, I meet retailers who are eager to learn how they can add a co-creation, customization, or personalization feature (collectively "Customization" with a capital 'C') to their existing offerings. They often start the conversation off with an overview of their current products and quickly move to a discussion about which of them cater to th...

Hulu Plus, an app from Hulu, is available for free at Google Play, but the service requires a US$7.99/month subscription. The 5-year-old subscription streaming video service known as "Hulu Plus" has doubled its subscriber numbers in the last seven months to more than 2 million, according to numbers bandied about by the company.

If you work with SIEM, you've been spending more than a couple of years, dealing with "Big Data" -- more lines of logs than any one person (or even a reasonable-sized team of people) could ever hope to keep up with reading through. Our data is plenty big enough already. So why is everyone so hyped over Big Data now?...

X-ray vision won't just be limited to comic book superheroes in the future. A team at the University of Texas at Dallas led by Kenneth O, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering, has made new scientific advances that could make it possible for cameras to see through solid walls ...

Verizon reported a strong first quarter of 2012, it revealed Thursday, thanks in part to new FiOS and wireless subscribers Verizon took in US$1.69 billion in profit, or 59 cents per share, an increase from the 51 cents per share it reported from the same time last year. The company's operating revenues were $28.2 billion, up 4.6 percent. The wirele...

Google CEO Larry Page continued his testimony on Wednesday in the trial over whether his company violated Oracle's Java patents and copyrights. Like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison attempted to do with his testimony on Tuesday, Page did his best to give little ground to the opposing counsel. Yet they managed to score points against Google anyway.

When Twitter eventually goes through an IPO (initial public offering), its investment bankers will be faced with the challenge of establishing a price per share for the company's stock. To the uninitiated, this might seem like a simple task. The fact is there are several valuation scenarios that can be used to price a stock. I'll describe two of ...

Just like 10 years ago, and then again five years ago, the technology industry is changing. That means companies are enjoying new opportunities and wrestling with new challenges. Only some will win. I'll offer my perspective as an analyst on who is winning, who is losing and why. I believe you will find this column both interesting and valuable Let...

"You can't get there from here." That's the classic gag about New Englanders giving road directions -- that somehow, the route that needs to be taken is so convoluted and confusing that there's no way to negotiate between two points on the surface of the Earth....

Have you ever accessed your home or small office router configuration settings and been bombarded with a mass of incomprehensible, cryptic computer-eze and senseless acronyms and abbreviations? ...

Will Microsoft let owners of smartphones running Windows Phone 7.5, nicknamed "Mango," upgrade to WinPho 8, also known as "Apollo?" At this point, the answer appears very unclear....

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently lives by the idea that it is better to ask forgiveness than permission. This seems to have been the case with his decision to acquire Instagram earlier this month. Zuckerberg alerted the board of directors only hours before Facebook's largest acquisition ever, as first reported by The Wall Street...

Demand for mobile devices is surging in markets around the world, and Research In Motion says it's making headway in places outside of its native North America. "All the real subscriber growth is international," Maribel Lopez, principal analyst at Lopez Research, told the E-Commerce Times. "You have to sell phones in India, China and other develop...

A new all-in-one home entertainment center announced Tuesday by Ikea may give some Baby Boomers a sense of deja vu The new product line is called "Uppleva" by the Swedish furniture retailer, known for making attractively designed products with odd names and selling them at affordable prices. It combines all the components of a home entertainment sy...

If there were any doubts as to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's attitude toward Google, those were dispelled in his testimony on Tuesday morning in a San Francisco U.S. District Court courtroom. Oracle has filed suit against Google, alleging that that its Android mobile operating system infringed on patents that Oracle acquired in 2009, when it bought S...

By 2020, the majority of U.S. consumers will use smartphones to pay for goods and services, concluded a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. The survey is unusual in that Pew queried tech stakeholders and leaders about the subject, as opposed to a random sample of the general population. Executives from such...

CRM vendors that have wondered about the necessity of porting their applications to the small screen (i.e. mobile) should take note of last week's acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Instagram is the tip of a big iceberg and is perhaps a signal of yet another disruption in a disruption-prone industry. It represents a big trend by emerging comp...